Duke's Trial by Media
Why the seamy lacrosse scandal may be too hot to be true
When her phone rang that last day of spring semester, Duke University junior Emily Rotberg didn't appreciate the 7 a.m. wake-up. Until her colleague from the Chronicle student newspaper told her what he'd just heard about the story they had been chasing for seven weeks: The black stripper who had accused three white Duke lacrosse players of raping her at a team party had made a similar--and unsubstantiated--claim against three men a decade earlier.
The news came on the heels of state crime lab results that failed to match any of the DNA samples from 46 team members with those taken from the woman in the hours after the alleged attack on March 13. All that quickly put the media horde following the case in a quandary. Did the story line many were pursuing--that a toxic collision of race, class, and alcohol had resulted in gang sexual violence--still hold up? Or were the accusations a pack of lies--or something in between?
Deeper. "That was the moment I realized that the story was going to be a lot ... deeper than anyone anticipated," Rotberg said recently. "This is a story that went from soap opera black-and-white to uncertain gray very quickly."
Everyone in the media--not just the tabloids and not just the talk show screamers--got a shot at writing a scene in this morality play. Early finger-waggers included the Los Angeles Times: "Duke lacrosse scandal reinforces a growing sense that college sports are out of control, fueled by pampered athletes with a sense of entitlement." Rolling Stone ran with "Sex and Scandal at Duke," detailing a "booze-fueled culture of the never-ending hookup." Affronted opiners like New York Times columnist David Brooks weighed in. The case is a witch hunt, he said, blaming the atmosphere on the "tenured left."
Whoever's to blame, lacrosse players Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and David Evans (who has since graduated) face trial next spring on charges of kidnapping and first-degree rape and sexual offense. And though Duke's Durham, N.C., campus is much quieter now that reporters and satellite trucks have moved on, students returning to classes late this month will find their campus till haunted by both the allegations and the accompanying press firestorm. That firestorm provided an uncomfortable glimpse at how tshe media's voracious appetite for scoops, Internet hits, and ratings can quickly reduce a complicated story--and a campus like Duke's--to caricature.
"We're in a world now where the tail wags the dog in terms of the most sensationalistic media leading the more respectable media," says Clarence Page, a Chicago Tribune columnist whose book Showing My Color explored issues of race.
Indeed, many early accounts stoked the image of the lacrosse team as a swaggering pack of white, privileged beer drinkers with a string of misdemeanor charges, and the accuser as a hard-working state college student stripping to stay in school and support her two children. Those images fed the journalistic convention that news is drama and drama is conflict--the simple calculation required to stitch together a cohesive narrative in time for a fast-approaching deadline. Nuance is, almost necessarily, a casualty, and accuracy a frequent victim.
"There seems to be an inability on the part of the press as a whole to wait and corroborate," says Mike Taibbi, an NBC News correspondent who wrote a book about his experience covering the 1987 kidnap and rape allegations by black teenager Tawana Brawley against six white law enforcement officers. His digging for WCBS-TV led to questions about Brawley's veracity; a grand jury eventually found her story not credible.
Corroboration, however, can sometimes take a back seat to giving the audience what it wants. Kevin Miller, host of a radio talk show on 680 WPTF in Raleigh, says the Duke story played out as "a perfect storm of race, culture, and class, and people just couldn't get enough of it." Miller has appeared frequently as a local expert on Nancy Grace's Headline News legal program.
The prosecutor. But simply bashing the media for selling an intriguing--if uncertain--narrative misses a significant variable of how the coverage unfolded: Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong's unequivocal public assertions that a rape occurred and that he had the evidence. Joseph Neff, a Raleigh News & Observer investigative reporter, wrote that the DA had called the players "hooligans" and gave more than 50 media interviews before he stopped responding to requests in early April. Nifong, facing a May 2 Democratic primary challenge, was "standing in front of the world saying we have these A, B, and C facts," Neff says. "It would be irresponsible for us not to report what the local district attorney is telling the community. That's our job."
It was during those watershed weeks in April and May that the narrative shifted perceptibly. Two rounds of DNA tests had come back negative, the past rape claim surfaced, and an internal Duke inquiry found that the lacrosse team--while frequently violating underage drinking laws and racking up more alcohol-related incidents than other Duke teams--had no in-class disciplinary problems and excelled academically.
Nifong went silent, and the players' defense lawyers then filled the vacuum; the media narrative seemed to become a different sort of morality play. Stories began to play up the accuser's inconsistent account and focus on reports that another stripper who had accompanied her--and initially called the rape allegations "a crock"--was soliciting a public relations firm to capitalize on her newfound fame. The lacrosse players were more frequently given a boys-will-be-boys pass by the press on their previous misdeeds; suddenly, they were no longer brutes spewing racial epithets but academically serious sons of regular folks like firefighters. New York Times columnist Peter Applebome, a Duke alumnus, wrote last month that Seligmann is everything one of his former teachers would want in a son. Fellow Duke alum Dan Abrams of MSNBC has also been seen as especially sympathetic to the lacrosse players.
Still, some aren't buying. Grace, a controversial victim's advocate with a nightly CNN show, dismisses the new story line. "These are guys partying at their house with strippers? And they're angels? I'm not buying that," Grace tells U.S.News. "But I've also made no bones about it: If [the alleged victim] has lied, she must be prosecuted for making a false report."
"Nifong better have a silver bullet," says Grace, who was roundly criticized for one episode on her show; she admonished a correspondent for reading lacrosse scores off a monitor when she asked for "stats." Not athletic stats, she told him, "I mean rape stats." The segment, Grace says, was intended to call on the carpet those more concerned about the lacrosse team than the alleged victim.
When students return, a new lacrosse coach will be on board, and the team's suspension will be history. Nifong, who won his primary, will be the front-runner in November's general election. (In his first press conference in months, he acknowledged that some of the criticism over his handling of the case was justified.) Student journalist Rotberg and Duke's new student body president, Elliott Wolf, will be back in school--a little older, a little wiser, a little warier. The way Wolf sees it, what happened last spring was not just about a potential crime. It was about people taking advantage. "It was about opportunism. The media for the story, Nifong wanting to get elected, and those raising the bloody flag of racism," he says. "We as students were caught in the middle."
This story appears in the August 14, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.